The shape of time

Damaraland, Namibia. The characteristic flat-topped mountains are remnants of lava flows erupted around 132 million years ago. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

The mountains of Damaraland stand in lines across the plain, flat-topped, stepped and terraced down their flanks. They are like giant elephant teeth.

The soft material went first. What stands is what was left.

There is something ancient about the landscape, not simply old but worked on for so long that the individual events have disappeared into form. Wind, heat, gravity, and occasionally water have acted on it for spans of time that are hard to comprehend. The mountains do not feel assembled so much as revealed, harder material left standing after everything around it has been worn away.

Road to Maltahöhe and Solitaire. Image by Felix Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

For much of the south and west, the landscape seemed to operate at this scale. Long horizons. Large shadows. Mountains separated from one another by enormous plains. A road sign can stand by itself against kilometres of empty country. A windmill becomes a landmark.

There is life everywhere, sometimes improbably so, but it rarely overwhelms the landscape. Lizards race across the sand. Geckos emerge from it. Snakes leave tracks that the wind takes back within the hour. Plants grow in places containing almost nothing from which a plant could reasonably be made.

Namaqua chameleon, Namib Desert. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

The chameleon was almost exactly the colour of the dry wood it was standing in: greys, browns, dust. One fleshy leaf beside it provided almost the only colour for some distance. That relationship between life and landscape seemed to repeat itself everywhere. Animals adapted themselves to the country rather than transforming it.

The dominant impression was still geological. Everything tended towards the smaller and the looser. Mountains became rock. Rock became gravel. Gravel became sand.

And sand moved.

At Sossusvlei the dunes are monumental. From a distance they look as fixed as the mountains behind them, but walking on them makes the illusion harder to maintain. Every grain is available to the wind. Surfaces shift. Crests sharpen and soften. The slip faces all lean the same way.

Big Daddy, Sossusvlei. The dune form has probably persisted for thousands of years, even as its sand continually moves. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

You feel the direction in your legs. Moving one way along the dunes, the landscape seems to carry you. Turn around, and every steep face is suddenly against you.

The dune persists because its parts don’t.

Even the sand itself has travelled. Much of it was carried down the Orange River to the Atlantic, moved north along the coast, then blown inland. River, ocean and wind have all had a hand in putting it where it is. What looks fixed is the product of movement.

Namib Sand Sea, Sandwich Harbour. A landscape of moving dunes that has persisted for more than a million years. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

Entropy is probably too grand a word for something you can watch happening under your feet, but it is the word that came to mind. Large things become small. Structured things become loose. The landscape is continually being dismantled, and yet it does not look ruined. Quite the opposite.

The dunes are ordered with extraordinary precision. Their ridges repeat across the landscape. The wind sorts loose grains into ripples and slopes, turning material with no fixed position into forms that can persist for thousands of years. There is a direction to the disorder.

That was part of what made the landscape feel so old. Not because nothing changed there, but because everything had been changing for so long. The landscape felt ancient because the work of time was everywhere.

Camel thorn trees, Deadvlei. Around 900 years old; believed to have died 600–700 years ago. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

Deadvlei complicates even that. The dead camel thorn trees have stood there for centuries, black against the white clay and red sand. In most places, a dead tree disappears. Fungi, insects, moisture, and microbes break it down, and its material returns to the biological system.

Here, there is not enough water. The trees are dead, but they cannot rot. In a landscape where almost everything seemed to be wearing away, these dead things had become strangely permanent because one of the usual mechanisms of decay had stopped working.

Even entropy has dependencies.

A 1938 Hudson 112 Coupé, Solitaire. Photographed at the site since at least 2010. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

Further north, around Etosha, there is more water, more vegetation and, suddenly, animals everywhere. Giraffes stand above the thorn trees. Zebra gather in their hundreds around waterholes. Elephants cross the road. Wildebeest, springbok, oryx, and ostrich become common enough to stop feeling exceptional.

The animals are extraordinary. The landscape is different. It is flatter. Scrub runs into more scrub. Short trees blur into one another across the horizon. Where vegetation disappears altogether, there is the great pale surface of the pan. It is alive in a way much of the south is not, but the grandeur has gone.

Giraffes near Etosha. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

I had assumed the two things would go together. More water would mean more life. More life would mean a richer landscape, and a richer landscape would somehow be more compelling. Instead, the animals become the subject, and the landscape becomes habitat.

In the south, it is difficult to separate anything from the surrounding land. Mountains, dunes, roads, animals, plants and buildings all seem subordinate to a few enormous forms. Around Etosha, the eye moves from thing to thing rather than across the whole.

Zebra at a waterhole, Etosha. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

Perhaps that was what I had been responding to in the south. Not emptiness exactly, and not even desert, but scale. The south is made from very large forms and very small components, with relatively little in between. Mountains and grains of sand. Sky and stone. A dune can fill half the horizon while being made entirely from pieces too small to hold individually.

Life fills that intermediate scale. Grass, scrub, branches, roots, herds, tracks, nests, leaves. A landscape becomes more complex, more productive, more varied.

But complexity is not the same thing as grandeur. I don’t think that makes Etosha less beautiful in any meaningful sense. It only made it less beautiful to me. What stayed with me was precisely that I had expected the opposite.

Leopard near Etosha. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

Looking back at the photographs afterwards, the same difference is there. In the north, the animals dominate the pictures. In the south, almost nothing does. A person becomes a mark against a dune. A road becomes a line across a plain. A tree can stand alone beneath an enormous sky. The landscape absorbs everything into scale.

And perhaps scale is one of the ways we perceive time.

The granite exposed in Damaraland is old beyond any useful human comparison. The dunes have been assembled, moved and reassembled over spans of time in which individual journeys and individual lives disappear completely. Their permanence is not the absence of change. It is change continuing for long enough to become form.

Fence line in northern Namibia. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License.

Permanence is not the opposite of change. A dune can persist while no grain in it has a permanent position. A mountain can endure while being taken apart. A dead tree can outlast generations because the conditions required to destroy it are absent.

Places are not collections of things. Mountains, dunes, trees and animals are what we see, but a landscape is also the shape made by forces acting for long enough that movement begins to look like stillness.

Namibia made that unusually easy to see.

The south felt ancient because nothing there seemed finished. Not unfinished. Still happening.